Daily News

Claims that Pius XII Was Framed Gaining Support (13469)

Former Romanian spy chief discusses how the myth of 'Hitler's Pope' started with Stalin.

Last month, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem revised a controversial text on Pope Pius XII used in its exhibition, changing it from an unfairly negative assessment of the wartime Pope and his record in saving the Jews, to one that includes a few arguments in his defense.

But the new text omitted sensational claims, originating from a former Romanian intelligence chief, that efforts to muddy Pius’s reputation began in Moscow very soon after World War II, and that the Soviets later led a campaign of disinformation — called “Operation Seat 12” — against the wartime Pope.

The claims were made in 2007 by General Ion Mihai Pacepa who once headed the Romanian intelligence service before defecting to the United States in 1978. He also claimed that Rolf’s Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy was used by Soviet intelligence as part of this wider plot to frame Pius. Some voiced skepticism of such KGB involvement, including a few sympathetic to Pius’s wartime record. One of those was University of Mississippi professor Ronald J. Rychlak. But rather than let it go, Rychlak spent two years investigating Pacepa’s story. He has since become so convinced of the veracity of it that he is writing a new book with him on the Soviet plot, called Disinformation.

In this July 20 interview with the Register, Pacepa discusses in detail his story of how the Soviets framed Pius and how, even today, the Russians continue to wage a war of intelligence against religion.

The head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem’s Holocaust museum, professor Dan Michman, told the Register in a recent interview that he rejected any notion of a Soviet plot to smear Pius XII and has refused to investigate it. What is your reaction to this?

I have never met professor Michman, but I did read his 67-page curriculum vitae. Fascinating. I have also glanced through some of his writings. All were based on solid, primary sources, primary evidence and primary recordings, not on stories told by others — all, except for his rejection of a Soviet plot to smear Pius XII. There is no hard, primary evidence to support his rejection. I am not accusing him, but there is simply no such evidence to confirm his position. There are plenty of books, shows, movies and news stories alleging that Pius was “Hitler’s Pope,” but there is not a single piece of hard, primary evidence proving that this new image of Pius was not born in Moscow.

There is, however, plenty of hard evidence proving that the portrayal of Pius XII as Hitler’s Pope was born in Moscow. In order to find and recognize this evidence, however, one should be familiar with the Kremlin’s very secret “science” of changing the past in order to suit current priorities.

In KGB jargon, changing the past was called “framing,” and it was a highly classified disinformation specialty. Because of those KGB framings, there are today few things more difficult for Russian and Western historians — including professor Michman — than to predict Russia’s past.

Let me give you a glimpse into this “science.”

In January 1934, the XVII Soviet Communist Party Congress was hailed as the “Congress of the Victorious.” A few years later, however, Stalin decided to change that past because it no longer fit his plans for the future. Accordingly, 98 out of the 139 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party elected at that Congress were portrayed as “enemies of the people” and executed.

In fact, 1,108 out of the 1,966 delegates to this Congress were declared “counterrevolutionaries,” and 848 of them were shot. All were charged with secretly plotting to assassinate the leadership of the party, an insinuation that gave Stalin (a) free hand to execute other party activists in order to eliminate all competition to himself. A few years later, the Congress of the Victorious was renamed “The Congress of the Condemned.”

I picked this example in order to give you and professor Michman a peek into the immensity of Kremlin framing operations designed to change the historical past. Those operations are like mosaics made up of hundreds or even thousands of tiny pieces fitted together — such as the party activists at the Congress of the Victorious. Only a handful of master designers know how the final image will turn out. I was peripherally involved in changing the past of Pius XII, but at that time, even I did not know what the final image would look like.

Michman said that smear campaigns usually involve hot topics, but at that time, the Holocaust was not a hot topic, and so it’s improbable that the Soviets would have organized such a campaign. What do you say to this view?

Seat 12 was not a smear campaign. It was a framing operation that is minutely described in an upcoming book, Disinformation, which I co-wrote with Professor Ronald Rychlak, a leading authority on the history of religion and a signatory of the Nashville Declaration on the Church and the Holocaust, for which he was honored by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2007.

In an introduction to this book, former CIA director James Woolsey states that its revelations about framing “will change the way you look at intelligence, foreign affairs, the press and much else.” There is no way for professor Michman to know exactly what any given framing operation really entails. I myself did not know about framing operations until I rose to the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community.

On March 6, 1953, 4 million people wept in Red Square at Stalin’s funeral. Sirens wailed, bells tolled, cars blew their horns, and work stopped all around the country. The whole Soviet Empire felt that an era of history had passed into oblivion with this man, whose name had been synonymous with communism for most of their lives.

At that time, I was already an officer of the far-flung Soviet bloc intelligence machinery, but I was not yet aware that a Soviet leader’s image was so important to him that he would go to any lengths — even to the point of killing and imprisoning millions, rewriting history, destroying institutions, manipulating religion and changing traditions — all in an effort to beatify himself or to demonize his competitors and enemies.

Some 20 years later, however, I was successfully running a large disinformation machine, the main purpose of which was to hoodwink Western heads of state, intelligence analysts, university experts and the general public on five continents into believing that communist tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was an admirable, pro-Western leader, when, in fact, he was a two-bit Dracula who had made life for his own people so unbearable that Romania would come to lead the world in the rate of suicides,.

In April 1978, President Jimmy Carter publicly hailed Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader” who “has not only brought tremendous progress to Romania, but also has taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community.” At the time, I was standing next to the two of them at the White House, and I just smiled to myself.

A couple of weeks later, the British queen honored Ceausescu with a historic drive through London. I had prepared that visit as well and was at Ceausescu’s right hand during it. During those days, almost everybody who was anybody in Washington and London was singing hosannas to the Romanian dictator. Day after day, the American and British media and members of both governments were describing him as a man who had done more for Romania than any of his predecessors. He was seen as a new kind of communist leader, one who had dared to defy Moscow.

Three months later, the United States granted me political asylum, and I informed President Carter and the queen of England how Ceausescu’s disinformation machinery had been feeding them a pack of lies for many years.

On Christmas Day 1989, Ceausescu was executed by his own people at the end of a trial whose main accusations came almost word for word out of my book Red Horizons. From one day to the next, the formerly feted Ceausescu became the symbol of communist tyranny. Few in the West, however, looked back to speculate about how they had been so misled.

By that time, Washington and the rest of the West had shifted their affections to the new man in the Kremlin, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Western governments now viewed Gorbachev as a political visionary and truly believed that his theory about combining “communist values” with “Western democracy introduced from the top” and with a “centralized free-market economy” would modernize the Soviet Union and make its economy self-sufficient. Gorbachev’s Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, which replaced Ceausescu’s books in the windows of Western bookstores, was now seen as the key to détente and stability in the world.

I hope professor Michman will read our upcoming book. It contains solid, primary evidence documenting how the immense KGB disinformation machinery was able to flip the image of Pius XII from lily white to coal black — just as it flipped the image of Ceausescu in reverse.

The changing of Pius XII’s past was a long, drawn-out framing operation that began in 1945 and had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Stalin — who came from Georgia, where the Jews had been serfs until 1871, and who had framed millions of Russians as Zionist spies — cared nothing about the Holocaust. All he cared about was his own image. And, in 1945, Stalin was on the top of the world.

On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany capitulated to the Allies, who now included the Soviet Union. Once denied diplomatic relations with most of the free world, Stalin could now join the exclusive victors’ club. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and he was ready to take on the world.

There was one more enemy Stalin wanted to defeat: the Ukrainian Catholic Church — the last Vatican enclave in the Soviet Union. Those Churches were beholden to another father, Pope Pius XII, and Stalin refused to even consider allowing any rival to interfere with his absolute reign. Therefore, he resorted to his tried and tested weapon of framing. The very prominent [Ukrainian Greek] Catholic archbishop of Lvov, Joseph Slipyj, and most of Ukraine’s bishops, including Gregory Chomysyn, John Laysevskyi, Nicolas Carneckyi and Josaphat Kocylovskyi, were framed by Stalin’s political police as “Nazi collaborators.” All were sent to jail or slave-labor camps. Some 500 Ukrainian Catholic priests were sent, without trial, to gulags — officially phrased as “destination unknown for political reasons.”

Pius XII answered by issuing an encyclical (Orientales Omnes Ecclesias) to the faithful in Ukraine, assuring them that “God will do justice” and that “in his loving kindness he will himself calm this terrible storm and finally bring it to an end.”

Stalin took Pius XII’s encyclical as a declaration of war, and he answered as was his wont: framing Pius XII as a Nazi collaborator.

On June 3, 1945, Radio Moscow proclaimed that the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, had been “Hitler’s Pope,” mendaciously insinuating that he had been an ally of the Nazis during World War II.

Radio Moscow’s insinuation fell flat as a pancake. Just the day before, on June 2, 1945, in an address to the sacred College of Cardinals that was broadcast on Vatican Radio, Pius XII condemned the “satanic specter of Nazism.”

Not long before that, President Roosevelt had published a letter to Pius XII, in which he expressed “my deeply felt appreciation of the frequent actions which the Holy See has taken … to render assistance to the victims of racial and religious persecutions.”

On Sept. 6, 1944, Winston Churchill had announced: “I have spoken today to the greatest man of our time.” Albert Einstein wrote: “Only the Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then, I had not been interested in the Church, but today I felt a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty.”

The secular magazine Wisdom editorialized: “Of all the great figures of our time, none is more universally respected by men of all faiths than Pope Pius XII.

The Kremlin’s attempt to frame Pius XII as Hitler’s Pope was rejected by that contemporary generation that had lived through the real history and knew who Pope Pius XII really was. The Kremlin tried again in the 1960s, with the next generation, which had not lived through that history and did not know better. This time it worked.

Comments

“You reply by providing a link that purports to show that Cardinal Pacelli made attempts to save **Catholics** who had converted from Judaism. But what has that to do with the point raised about Pius’s public silence? “

This was a cover, that meant ALL Jews, since the Nazis would only protect Aryans. The words had to be intercepted.

“High Vatican officials have verified to us that the terms Non-Aryan Catholics, non-Aryans, Catholic Jews
all indeed meant Jews.”

Pave the Way Foundation has spent a lot of time studying documents and has many official church documents on their site. If their critics do not want to accept what’s before their eyes that is their problem. They are the ones engaging in historical revisionism.

For a long time critics have said open the archives. Now when the documents are before their eyes, they refuse to accept them.

Posted by John McArthur on Thursday, Aug 30, 2012 10:39 AM (EDT):

Savvy,
I describe how the assertion made by Moscow radio about the public silence of Pius XII is confirmed by all scholars that I know. There never was any explicit condemnation of the Nazi etermination of Jewish people at the time it was happening. You reply by providing a link that purports to show that Cardinal Pacelli made attempts to save **Catholics** who had converted from Judaism. But what has that to do with the point raised about Pius’s public silence?
The work of Pave the Way Foundation has been subject to harsh criticism by many scholars and long established Jewish groups and if you believe that the past is a memory of the future then you are being ill served by historical revisionism such as this.

Posted by savvy on Wednesday, Aug 29, 2012 2:36 PM (EDT):

John McArthur,

“Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) sent a telex November 30, 1938 to the Nunciatures and Apostolic Delegations
as well as a letter to 61 Archbishops in the Catholic world requesting 200,000 visas for “Non Aryan Catholics” three
weeks after Kristallnacht; In addition he sent additional letters dated January 9, 1939. “

There are documents available on Pave the Way Foundation that should answer your questions.

It is important that General Ion Mihai Pacepa doesn’t appear to be still using the techniques of spin which he learned as a Soviet agent which could cast doubts as to the trustworthiness of his current views.

He writes above “On June 3, 1945, Radio Moscow proclaimed that the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, had been “Hitler’s Pope,” thus is born the title of John Cornwell’s book “Hilter’s Pope”. But according to the text available on the internet Radio Moscow didn’t call him “Hitler’s Pope”. They said that he had remained “silent when the German death machines were running, when the chimneys of the cremating ovens were smoking”. Presumably this was in response to Pius’s speech to the College of Cardinals the day before in which he spoke of “the ruinous and relentless applications of the national socialist doctrine which went as far as using the latest scientific methods to torture and suppress often innocent people”. The issue of Pius’s public “Silence”, i.e the validity of the argument that if he spoke out explicitly it would have made things worse, has been the subject of ongoing debate ever since. To label a source “Soviet” may be relevant in determining what motivates a person or an organisation but that is a separate issue from the veracity of what they say.

The article above doesn’t undermine the common charge that Pius never explicitly spoke out against the Holocaust but rather attempts to smear anyone who feels that the Church was less than forthright in condemning the holocaust whilst it was happening, and not just after the war was effectively over; e.g. Soviet=Evil=Lies and therefore the whole debate on the issue of Pius’s silence is dismissed by crude sleight of hand methods .

General Ion Mihai Pacepa should state clearly when he believes Pius spoke out during the war naming the Nazis, Jews, and extermination process so we can determine if his claim that it was all Soviet “disinformation” about Pius’s silence has any merit. As best I know not even the most ardent defender of the Pope’s diplomacy makes such a claim. The best that can be said is Pius may indeed have thought that the somewhat vague allusions he did make were clear and unequivocal, but no scholar I know believes that is so. The common argument is that if Pius had indeed spoken out clearly it would have made things worse. The common reply to that is “what could be worse than the total extermination of Jews” as soon as it become know in 1942/43.? Attacks on Catholics who made up almost 50% of the expanded Reich?

General Ion Mihai Pacepa writes “The changing of Pius XII’s past was a long, drawn-out framing operation that began in 1945 and had nothing to do with the Holocaust.” The reality is that Pius was being pushed much earlier to speak out. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Myron C. Taylor as his representative to the Vatican in 1941 and he kept asking for the Pope to speak out against Nazi atrocities. The British representative to the Vatican wrote in 1942 that “A policy of silence in regard to such offences against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence of the Vatican.” Both these diplomats thought Pius was a saintly figure but that doesn’t mean they regarded him as a perfect political leader who couldn’t make mistakes when it came to handling the Nazis.

The supposed Einstein quotation given by the General above praising the Catholic Church in Time magazine was debunked a while ago. He did praise the Church after the war when it finally made explicit condemnations of the Nazis and the extermination of Jewish people. In private conversation he was very critical of the concordat the Church signed with the Nazis in 1933. (See the Wikipedia article “Religious views of Albert Einstein”)

The General is also wrong when he claims nobody really complained about Pius’s diplomacy until the “The Deputy”. The French Catholic intellectual François Mauriac, wrote in the introduction to a book in 1951 “we never had the comfort of hearing the successor of Galilee, Simon Peter, [i.e Pius XII] use clear and precise words, rather than diplomatic allusions, to condemn the countless crucifixions of the ‘brothers of the Lord’ [i.e Jewish people.”

Posted by savvy on Sunday, Aug 19, 2012 3:32 PM (EDT):

Trebert,

These are Your opinions Alone. They do not have basis in either scripture or tradition. Scripture warns against private revelation. Please stop abusing scripture to promote your views.

Posted by Angelo on Friday, Aug 17, 2012 10:15 AM (EDT):

Bob Rowland, Thanks for reccomending the Book by Fr. Apostoli. It will be great to read something new on Our Lady of Fatima that is faithful to its real message. Your comment was a breath of fresh air. For some years all I’ve been hearing is that the Consecration was not valid, Sister Lucia locked in her cell under lock and key, the imposter Sister Lucia, Sister Lucia ordered under obedience to lie about the validity of the Consecration, conspiracy theories, Freemasons in all this, ect… Thats why your post was a breath of fresh air. I remember the Consecration and how it was amazingly done. I wish I could find a parish in our Diocese that would request a visit and welcome the Pilgrim Virgin. I’m gonna work on it. Thanks again. And yes I will continue to pray for their success.

Posted by Brian A Cook on Friday, Aug 17, 2012 9:34 AM (EDT):

I felt compelled to post on this site. Raymond Rice apparently denying that Francisco Franco played footsie with the Nazis (though I will admit that whether he himself was properly fascist is debatable). Raymond is linking Jews to Communist murders of Christians. So is Chi. I would be shocked if I could be surprised by such rhetoric anymore.

Posted by Joseph Curtin on Friday, Aug 17, 2012 9:12 AM (EDT):

There is ample evidence that Pius XII was instrumental in saving many Jews, especially in Rome, as the Germans were fleeing Italy, and the story is well documented visually in the programs available on the internet service of RAI, the Italian public TV service.
What troubles Italians is that Pius XII (and the entire Vatican establishment during his tenure) never spoke out against the “Manifesto della razza” (the “racial laws”) enacted in 1938, unlike his predecessor, Pius XI.
Thus, when the Germans decided to implement the “final solution” as they departed Italy, they had only to avail themselves of the documentation compiled by the Mussolini government to know just how many Jews there were, and where they were located.
Just how much an influence the Pope might have had on Mussolini’s policies is open to debate, but there at least seems to have been a “conspiracy of silence” in the Vatican in this regard.

Posted by Trebert on Thursday, Aug 16, 2012 3:17 PM (EDT):

Charles Coughlin,
Like Chi, you too missed have the whole entire point of my initial response to this article. Forget about what one historian has to say about another; their legitimacy or their particular bias. Instead think about how the opposing two sides can be brought together.(Blessed are the peacemakers)
The counter argument(s) may be right or wrong. That’s not the point. Should Pius XII sainthood be declared is not important either. After all we are all ‘saints in the making’. Your argument ‘more Christians were killed than Jews’ is precisely the king of rhetoric that keeps ancient prejudices alive and reactivates old hatreds. It does nothing to bring Christ’s healing to the fore. Let that be the focus of your thoughts each day. If our Catholic Church is worried about its damaged image it has forgotten that it is the image of God we should look for instead.

Posted by chi on Thursday, Aug 16, 2012 12:12 PM (EDT):

Carroll’s writing is mere fiction story with the subjects and objects of his story being churned continuously and viciously in the vortex of his warped, truncated and jaundiced thoughts. The motive behind his writing is wrapped around mischief that has exposed a lot of poor intellectualism and poor scholarship. This writing must be dismissed with the greatest contempt it sure deserves. Alternatively, it might be called heresy but heretics write from within the confines of an organization they disparage. From all indications, Carroll is not a Catholic or even a Christian. So I don’t know where to place him other than to say he is just a rabble-rouser that rolls along like a rolling stone that gathers no moss.

Posted by Raymond J Rice4 on Thursday, Aug 16, 2012 11:33 AM (EDT):

Thank you cCharles Couglin for posting the review in First Things written by Thomas F.X. Noble. I read a half a dozen magazines from cover to cover. My first choice is “First Things”. It was a GREAT review. I will comment on the final sentence. When god fearing Jews reached out to Christians in the document “Dabru Emet”, it was welcomed by American Jewry like a lead baloon… SAD!!!

Posted by Charles Coughlin on Thursday, Aug 16, 2012 1:54 AM (EDT):

To Trebert,
Constantine’s Sword has been extensively discredited. Unfortunately this instrument of disinformation is in virtually every Public Library in the USA. It is a disoriented world you and I inhabit. For example observe how seldom it is acknowledged that more Christians than Jews were exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust.
I attach a book review from “First Things” as small token and the first step in the journey I pray you take.

Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
by Thomas F. X. Noble

Caveat Emptor! This book looks like a bargain, three books for the price of one. It contains a history of Catholicism’s relationship with Judaism and the Jews; a plea for a Christology that would, largely, remedy the most distasteful aspects of that history; and an autobiography of the author, a successful novelist and National Book Award winner. Alas, the history is always amateurish and often wrong; the theology is an affront to any form of historic Christianity; and the author comes off as smug, sanctimonious, and unctuous.
Start with the history that Carroll tells and with the way he tells it. Carroll is an amateur historian. He has no degrees in the subject and, to judge from this book, no expertise in either Jewish history or church history. Historians normally work with primary sources—documents roughly contemporary with the events to which they pertain—and with the best scholarship dealing with those documents and with the history surrounding them. Carroll has read no cache of documents for himself and, as far as I can tell, has never crossed the threshold of an archive. Occasionally he cites a source, but a look at his endnotes will always reveal that he has cribbed the reference and quotation from someone else. There is no evidence that he reads Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, and yet he comments in an authoritative tone on histories that demand a knowledge of those languages.
Where modern scholarship is concerned, Carroll’s amateurism is compounded by his tendentiousness. That is, for the periods and problems he treats, he tends to cite only one or two studies, saying portentously that a famous author or book “informs” his current discussion. Yet Carroll seems to cite only the author or authors who agree with his views. So, for instance, John Dominic Crossan becomes the authority for the New Testament period and John Cornwell serves as the biographer of Pius XII. One would not let a college freshman get away with that. Finally, there are monuments of both Jewish and church history produced by European scholars, but I see no titles in French, German, or Italian. Judged on every possible scale, this is a lightweight book—despite its ample girth.
Yes, an amateur can get it right. Did Carroll? I think not. He opens up a key question—how did religious and cultural anti–Judaism turn into murderous anti–Semitism—but fails to handle it adequately. Carroll’s central thesis is that a generation or two after the life of Christ, a series of authors, the men we know as the evangelists, decided that it was better to get along with the powerful Romans than the despicable Jews and scripted the first version of the blood libel. That is, they made the Jews the murderers of Christ. They pulled off this clever feat by historicizing the prophecies of the Old Testament in such a way as to make Jesus Christ appear to be the Messiah. Moreover, they recorded the “intuition” of the apostles and disciples that Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus’ contemporaries actually only believed that Jesus’ love survived him, but as they gradually shifted from praying for him to praying to him they invented the story of his resurrection. So, in Carroll’s telling, the evangelists not only blamed the Jews for killing the man Jesus but for killing the Messiah. Carroll assures us that this account must be true because Crossan and the Jesus Seminar say so. Along the way Carroll cavalierly dismisses Raymond Brown, mentions a few other scholars with whom he has had conversations, and cites as his authority on Christology Rosemary Radford Ruether, with nods in the direction of Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Küng.
One hardly knows where to begin in responding to all this. Carroll desperately wants to blame Jesus’ death on the Romans. He does say that we cannot quite know what it was that got Jesus in trouble with the authorities but he decides that it is enough to assert that the Romans were meddlesome and murderous. Then he says that it is anachronistic to hold an ancient empire to modern standards of universal human rights but goes on to conclude that Rome did not measure up to minimum (whose?) standards. Carroll’s fuzzy and contradictory thinking aside, he simply does not understand the Romans. And I do not think that he understands much about how or why the New Testament books were written, and I am certain that he will persuade few that the New Testament was “a tragic historical mistake.”
But to return to Carroll’s thesis. The conversion of Constantine was “the second greatest story ever told.” The emperor was an exclusionary universalist who imposed his will on the Church. Before a battle Constantine saw a cross in the sky with the words “In this sign you shall conquer.” What is more, his mother, Helena, was a relic–monger who went in search of the True Cross and the Seamless Robe. She found them. Accordingly, the Cross became the symbol of a militant Christianity that would henceforth cut down its foes. This more or less explains Carroll’s title.
But Carroll is not quite through spelling out his thesis. The Nicene Creed, he says, regrettably made Jesus divine but stressed his Incarnation and Resurrection. Then, be­ cause of Constantine and Helena, the Council of Constantinople inserted “He was crucified” into the primitive text of the Creed, and thereafter Christ’s death, already attributed to the Jews by those inventive evangelists, now replaced his life as the central fact of Christianity. Some Church Fathers, notably John Chrysostom and Ambrose of Milan, were positively vicious in their denunciations of the Jews, but Augustine of Hippo defined the basic Catholic position for centuries when he said that Jews must be permitted to survive, though not to thrive, as a reminder of Christianity’s truth.
All of this is, once again, bad history. Any interested reader can find several expert books to correct Carroll’s simplifications concerning Constantine. His misunderstanding of the development of the text of the Creed and of the attitude of the Church Fathers toward the Jews is a more serious matter. The so–called Nicene Creed was in a state of evolution for more than a century, but it never at any stage omitted reference to or a grounding in the Crucifixion. The change in terminology that Carroll believes he has discovered is neither significant in itself nor attributable to Constantine and his mother. Sometimes the Fathers of the Church said ugly things about Jews. But they did so not because Jews were helpless victims and Judaism superseded. Quite the contrary. Judaism was thriving in late antiquity and the Fathers were alarmed by what they took to be a real and potent rival.
In any case, the implications of this early history for the future were momentous. There is, Carroll suggests, an “arc” that runs from Golgotha to Auschwitz, and this in two respects. Viewed in one way, it is a two–thousand–year–old narrative of the centrality of the Cross to Western Civilization. Viewed in another way, it means that because the first cross was falsely blamed on the Jews, a second cross could be erected in a place of indescribable Jewish suffering to co–opt and supersede that torment on behalf of the Christians, mainly Poles, who also died at Auschwitz. Put in simplest terms, it is Carroll’s argument that Western Civilization has been propelled primarily by Catholicism’s hatred for the Jews.
Having muddled his way through antiquity, Carroll turns to the Middle Ages. Of course, he tells about the wanton massacres of Rhineland Jews on the eve of the First Crusade (1096), the emergence and dissemination of the grotesque stories according to which Jews captured and ritually crucified Christian boys, the bizarre rumors about Jews poisoning wells, the Inquisition and its attempts to force conversion on the Jews, and finally about the many times when Jews were expelled from their homelands, most famously from Spain in 1492. Carroll also mentions the many popes, bishops, and secular rulers who befriended and protected Jews, albeit doing so within the Augustinian “survive but don’t thrive” motif.
The story, of course, is a sad one, and the author thinks that the Church has not fully confronted its implications. Carroll repeatedly turns to “We Remember” (1998) and “Memory and Reconciliation” (1999) to insinuate that the Catholic Church was wrong, in the face of the medieval evidence, to claim in those documents that while Catholics did appalling things for which apologies are in order, the Church “as such” did not.
It seems to me that on this subject there has been a dialogue of the deaf. Church authorities have been less frank and forthcoming than they might have been. Most people are not trained to read and understand the subtleties of ecclesiastical pronouncements. It is all well and good for professionals to toss around those “as suchs,” but ordinary laypeople need a little help with them. Critics of the Church, for their part, unfailingly read the actions of Catholic individuals or communities as the actions of the Church. Never mind that no medieval pope or council authorized or incited the murder of Jews and that many clerics and councils thundered against the preposterous blood libels. Perhaps someday the passions will cool on both sides of this argument and good sense will prevail.
Back to the history. There are again interesting omissions and mistakes in the book’s medieval sections. Carroll interprets the Crusades as the “necessary outcome of an exclusionary and totalitarianizing culture.” Why, then, did the crusading movement begin in the late eleventh century and why was it spent by 1300? How do Byzantine vulnerabilities to the Turks and economic rivalries in the Mediterranean basin figure in Carroll’s scheme? Why were massacres of Jews a particular feature of the First Crusade? Carroll’s only answers to questions like these depend on the violence inherent in the Cross—the Crusaders were, after all, crucesignati, signed by the Cross.
But Carroll’s obsession with the Cross causes him some other problems. One of the most serious of these has to do with the way he mangles the theology of Anselm of Canterbury, in particular his profound Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man). Carroll says that Anselm, good Constantinian that he was, wrote this book to prove that Jesus became man to die. This terrible doctrine of atonement, Carroll insists, intensified Catholicism’s fixation on the Cross with inevitably murderous results for the Jews, long identified as Christ–killers. To make this point, Carroll cites Jaroslav Pelikan badly and out of context. He seems not to notice that he has no company on the slender branch on which he is perched.
Carroll is not yet done confusing himself and his readers about medieval theology. He likes Peter Abelard because he was a “liberal” and a “humanist.” (This from an author who earlier solemnly warned us about anachronism.) Abelard used logic and human reason to arrive at positions that anticipated those of the Jesus Seminar. It was “conservative” monks who did him in. That Anselm was himself an accomplished and innovative logician seems to have escaped Carroll’s notice. It almost seems as if Carroll likes St. Thomas Aquinas only because some of his propositions were condemned. But then, Thomas was a logician, so that makes him, like Abelard, a good guy. But Thomas agrees with Anselm more than he does with Abelard. So perhaps Thomas is a bad guy after all.
Carroll’s history marches along like this page after page. It is when he gets to the twentieth century that he is at his worst. He concludes, predictably, with Pius XII. He does not think Pius an evil man, just a misguided one whose moral shortcomings caused unprecedented suffering. In Carroll’s telling Eugenio Pacelli devoted his life to elevating the centralizing power of the papacy. Thus when he concluded the Reichs­ konkordat with Hitler’s new government on behalf of Pius XI in 1933, the point of the exercise was to bring the troublesomely independent German episcopate to heel and, in the bargain, to destroy the German Center Party. This is reductionism on a majestic scale.
The Konkordat, it is true, granted precious legitimacy to Hitler’s still young government. In hindsight, it would have been better to postpone or retract it. But it is worth remembering that we have hindsight; they didn’t. It is also true that some German Catholics, including intellectuals and members of the clergy, became Nazi party members and wrote disgusting things about Jews. They may have been prompted to do so by their understanding of the Konkordat. But larger currents were flowing in those difficult days.
Carroll correctly identifies but seems not to understand the issues that help to explain papal conduct in the 1920s and ’30s. Garibaldi’s march on Rome, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Kulturkampf had called into question virtually every aspect of the papacy’s historical relationship with rulers and governments. Until the Lateran accords were signed with Mussolini, the popes had been virtual prisoners inside the Vatican. Eugenio Pacelli was trying to reinvent the papacy as an effective, influential institution in a world that seemed to have little need, modest respect, and no fear of it. Moreover, as Carroll says, “the Church had been thrown off balance by liberalism or modernism, that post–Enlightenment confluence of political revolution, intellectual skepticism, and cultural secularism.” In the circumstances, and well before the reality of Nazism was apparent to all, it is not so difficult to see how many people, and not just Catholic leaders, were tempted by Nazism’s stress on order and authority and by its staunch opposition to Bolshevism and the many decadences of modern culture.
Carroll dismisses anyone who has spoken on behalf of Pius XII as a “defender” or “advocate”; whereas he himself, and his primary source, John Cornwell, are portrayed as disinterested and objective. At one point Carroll dismisses Hannah Arendt be­ cause she argued that Catholic Jew–hatred was insufficient to explain Hitler’s atrocities. But surely, pace Carroll, she was right. Why was there no Holocaust before Hitler? Why Germany? How does one explain Stalin’s fanatical anti–Semitism given that he was notoriously unsympathetic to Catholicism? Arendt understated the point.
Carroll wishes for a different future so he imagines different pasts. He talks repeatedly of history as a “drama” and says that the actions of the actors are less interesting than their motivations. Fair enough, but he does a poor job of identifying the motives of the historical actors whom he chooses to discuss. And the historian, unlike the novelist, cannot artfully assign motives. Carroll says that it takes “moral maturity” to recognize the connections between events that others have overlooked or denied. This is fatuous. Page after page of this book would serve admirably in a college history class as an object lesson in false inferences and mistaken links of causation.
The book adopts several novelistic devices that are annoying and distracting. Again and again Carroll takes the reader back to Trier, a small town in western Germany. It was from Trier that Constantine launched his campaign to become emperor, there that he built a palace, there that Helena installed relics, there that Crusaders murdered Jews, there that Karl Marx was born, and there that the Seamless Robe was displayed twice in the twentieth century, once in 1933 after the Reichskonkordat and once in 1959 in Carroll’s own presence. Carroll has fixed tenaciously on a series of coincidences and seen in them a pattern of deep meaning.
More annoying, however, is his strategy of telling the story of the Church’s relationship with Jews and Judaism as his own personal story. Everything turns on when he learned this, felt that, or was told something else. He has succumbed to the postmodern temptation to assume that, finally, it is all about me. Be that as it may, it is both towering arrogance and bad historical method to insist that history depends on, and is precisely coincident with, one’s own dawning insights.
Carroll ends with a call for a Third Vatican Council, a call that is unlikely to be answered. He wishes for a Council whose participants would be equally drawn from all the branches of the family of man, even those who don’t believe or are hostile to the Church. The Council would take as its key responsibility, in so far as the Church itself is concerned, a liberal aggiornamento, a completely undiscriminating pluralism, that would, almost certainly, bring the Church to an end. But most implausibly, this Council would retell the gospel story so that Jesus Christ is not uniquely the Son of God and not the Messiah. He died because he was human, and humans die. He did not die for the sins of others. This is a Jesus who would not threaten Jews. No sensible Christian, of course, could embrace this caricature, but one wonders even if theologically serious Jews, such as those who wrote the recent Dabru Emet (see “Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity,” FT, November 2000), would respect such a Christianity.

Thomas F. X. Noble is Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

Posted by Trebert on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012 11:32 PM (EDT):

There is a quote in the bible that reads: “Anyone who says something against the Son of Man can be forgiven; but whoever says something against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven - now or ever. (Mat. 12:32) This crypic note used to bother me considerably until one day a great spiritual teacher explained it in this way. There are secrets within our hearts that we simply do not wish to reveal to anyone - even God or the Holy Spirit. Until we release them to the Creator we will be held captive to them. Or in other words God cannot heal that what we refuse to give up.
When we as Christians cannot, or will not admit to our collective wrongdoings, i.e., the persecution of the Jews as well as other relgions through the centuries, the current bullying of gays, etc., etc., we will not be healed.
Articles such as these may rewrite history a thousand times, laying blame here and there but completely overlook the need for us to stop using scapegoats for those sins which we refuse to surrender to the Holy Spirit.

Posted by Chi on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012 11:55 AM (EDT):

@Raymond, thank you for that exposé on the aiding and abetting of massacre of 20 million Christians by the Jews! But most of these Jews would put that aside and continue to point blood-stained fingers at innocent people, including Pope Pius XII, who never had any hand in the Hitler-supervised pogrom or holocaust against the Jews! That is quintessential Judaism; Judaism at its best! In view of this I hope the Jews should shut up and move on with their lives. They should stop engaging in nebulous shadow-boxing, especially against wrongly-perceived enemies. They should go and hold Hitler responsible for what happened to them. But while doing that, they should equally realize that their own hands had been stained with blood; and he who comes to equity must come with clean hands.

Posted by Raymond J Rice4 on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012 10:38 AM (EDT):

Pope Pius XII was a compassionate and learned man. He helped the Jews when he could. He convinced Franco to give to every Jew that came to the Spanish emgassy, a Serphadic Passport , enabling them to cross the border to spain .This drove Hitler bonkers, as did Francos refusal to let Hitlers armies cross through Spain to attack Gibralter and control the Mediteranean , Southern Europe and North Africa. The first thing Eisenhower did when Germany surrendered was to fly to Spain to embrace and thank Franco.The Pope knew that Jews worldwide supported the Bolsheviks in Spain whose main enemy was the Church. This support continues today in the Ny Times and among Jewish intellectuals. The pope , a diplomat was regularly informed by his Bishops of Bolshevik attrocities that killed twenty million Christians through starvation by Stalin’s Bolshevik oppression, (Which in the twenties and thirties had widespread Jewish support.) The Pope could have held World Jewry responsible butlike a good Christian he extended a helping hand wherever it was needed.

Posted by kay on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012 10:21 AM (EDT):

Raymond, Some how we knew this to be the case. when we were educated in an authentic Catholic school back in the 50-60’s. But then maybe it was because I had Polish nuns.

Posted by kay on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012 10:11 AM (EDT):

Raymond - Some how we knew this to be the case. If you were educated in an authentic Catholic school back in the 50-60’s you were taught about religious persecution. But then maybe it was because I had
Polish nuns.

Posted by Chuck on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012 10:05 AM (EDT):

To Trebert,
Bokenkotter is not as highly regarded as you might suspect and his quote is proof. After Pius found out about the concentration camps and after Hitler’s subsequent march into Belgium, Pius urged the Bishops and priests of Belgium to speak out against Hitlers’ atrocities in their Sunday sermons, which they did. The next day Hitler flew into one of his rages and deported thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps and certain death. Pius, relying on his diplomatic skills and experience as past Secretary of State of the Vatican, realized you cannot speak out against a madman. So he took the battle underground- what you and Bokenkotter and everyone at 60 Minutes mistakenly call neutrality- and saved thousand and thousands of Jews. And that is why, my friend, Pius is a Saint. Pray to him.

Posted by Raymond J Rice4 on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 7:56 PM (EDT):

I have lived through and studied both WWII and the Spanish Civil War. A common technique of the Bosheviks (as the Communists called themselves until Stalin’s death), was to use thier well developed world propaganda machine to label any opponent of Bolshevism as FASCIST . The left wing press and University sympathisers followed thir lead. Pope Pius XII was never a Fascist,, nor was Gen. Franscisco Franco. The Ny Times and many University Professors today are corrupted by Bolshevik misinformation. This is SAD!

Posted by Trebert on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 4:47 PM (EDT):

Chi,

You did not read or understand my response at all and missed the all important point that was missed in the article. Nowhere did I accuse any Pope of any wrongdoing; that is for you to decide alone. What I did ask readers is that they examine their own lives with respect to scapegoating others as a place for their own sins.

Posted by Bob Rowland on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 4:26 PM (EDT):

Angelo: Father Andrew Apostoli.C.F.R.i has published a new book, Fatima For Today, The Urgent Marian Message of Hope, that is the most definitive document I have ever seen concerning Fatima and its on-going influence in the world today. You should read it. The Rhode Island Division of the WAF has the United Nations International World Apostolate of Fatima Pilgrim Virgin Statue that is making the rounds in the United States. The custodian has the relics of Francisco and Jacinta to bless those who come to visit her. Anyone interested in scheduling a visit can contact them by visiting http://www.thefatimastatue.org A mem.ber of their organization is working on a book in anticipation of the Centennial Celebration in 2017. Relatively unpublicized actions are underway to revive interest in Our Lady of The Rosary and Fatima. Pray for their success.

Posted by Chi on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 3:19 PM (EDT):

@Trebert, you seem to remain obstinate as to the series of facts surrounding this matter! Your response still seems to suggest that there are still some ‘undisclosed evidence’ in the Vatican archive that would nail Pope Pius XII as a conspirator in the Holocaust! This mindset of yours had made you not to either comprehend this article or bother to read the article. If you had fully comprehended the article you would have realized that the Vatican had not hidden anything away; you would have realized that much better Jewish researchers had investigated those records and had been stunned by the pope’s innocence, contrary to your obstinate mindset. Maybe you expected the pope to have raised an army to go and fight Hitler in order to stop the Jewish Holocaust? What is being revealed in these articles have been adjudged the truth. You either take it or leave it. In any case your obstinate mindset does not really matter. But if you have contrary evidence against these facts then bring them up. It is wicked to continue accusing an innocent person of the sins he never committed.

Posted by Angelo on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 2:10 PM (EDT):

Bob Rowland, Scripture says in the OT, “The promise still has its time”. Bl. John Paul ll made the Fatima consecration in 1984. Many things in the world have gotten worse, but our Lady did say, “The Holy Father will make the Consecration, but it will be late.” After the Consecration Sister Lucia assured that Our Lady would keep her promise, but that the people of Russia have a freewill. I have read many good things have happened in Russia. When Rome revealed the Third Secret, they said all the prophecies have been fulfilled with the exception of the annialation of certain nations. As a member of Our Lady’s Blue Army I continue to try to spread devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary through her Rosary and Brown Scapular. That God has not struck the world yet, is because many of us have kept our Blue Army Pledge. How I wish that the World Apostolate of Fatima would revive and spread the Blue Army pledge again. It is most necessary. Today Israel is threatening to attack Iran, this could spark a terrible war. We need to pray for the conversion and for peace between Israel and Iran. Lately I have heard many attacks against the Church, that Russia needs to be consecrated as Our Lady said. Why will they not accept that it has already been done. And leave the false arguments alone and pray the Rosary for peace. Thanks for your Post. God Bless!

Posted by Bob Rowland on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 1:16 PM (EDT):

I begin to understand even more why the message if Mary at Fatima un 1917 is still highly relevant. Could it be that she may have been responding to the Congress of the Condemned as the errors Russia is trying to spread throughout the world? For over 30 years after a military career,I was quite active, until age slowed me down, in the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima now the World Appostolate of Fatima. We are approaching the Centennial of Fatima. Russia has now been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as requested, bu we are no closer to the peace Mary promised if we would honor her wishes at Fatima and the failed many forms of amoral socialist philosophy that has been destroying civilization throughout history is on our doorstep. We had better reject it in our next election, and turn more attention to the Mother of God and the Rosary and Consecration to her Immaculate, because she is the only one who can save the world from its rejection of God.

Posted by Angelo on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 1:11 PM (EDT):

Many times I confess, I have been tempted to anti-semitism. Since the Canonization of St. Teresa Benedicta A Cruce or also known as St. Edith Stein, I have asked her intercession to obtain the favor of not falling into this error. When I first heard of the revision at the yad vashem Holocaust Museum, that came about by righteous Jews, all anti-semitism dissolved. I have to realize that all races have their good and bad people. But the media hardly reports on good Jews. They report more on what bad ones say about the Catholic Church and Catholics themselves. That makes it easy to be tempted to being anti Jew. St. Teresa Blessed by the Cross, Ora Pro Nobis!

Posted by Eileen on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 12:59 PM (EDT):

We have the same type of misinformation operating here in the United States.
Just look at how the Church and Pope Benedict are portrayed.

Posted by kay on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 12:31 PM (EDT):

Not that long ago it was well known that Russia was changing history to suit the one in power. Of course that was probably during the “cold war”. It was also understood that communism was a corrupt form of government and one of their primary targets was the Church. Sad to see how poorly formed and catechized Catholics are if this is coming as a surprise. If our country’s students are no longer informed about this awful practice of framing in other countries, then they become the ‘framed’. They are not prepared to recognize it when it happens in their own country. Before 2008, certain labor statistics were available on the Dept. of Labor website. By the start of 2009 they had been removed. Those very statistics did not support O’s claims in the 2008 campaign that not since the depression had our unemployment been so bad. A quick check on the DOL website proved him wrong, but today…now all of the labor statistics prior to WWII have been deleted. Small business has been framed. Personal achievement has been framed. The Church continues to be framed. Framing in the US didn’t start with O but the persecution phase is heating up.

Posted by Trebert on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 12:23 PM (EDT):

This article completely misses a far greater and significant point.

The Vatican so far has refused to open the wartime files on Pope Pius XII. “One question often arises in this connection” writes noted Catholic Church Historian, Thomas Bokenkotter, “did Pius carry neutrality too far in refusing to publically denounce the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, the Poles, the Serbs, and others?”
The persecution of Jews by Christians, beginning in the Third Century, is well documented by numerous Catholic authors such as James Carroll in his award winning book ‘Constantine’s Sword’ (2002). The extermination of more than 5 - 6 million Jews during WWII is ample evidence of the level of anti-Semitism that existed at that time and continues to this day.
Here’s the point for us to consider individually - the question of which Pope was, or was not, responsible for fomenting hatred against the Jews can only be answered by our own individual response which is our constant need to find scapegoats to hide our sins.

Pius XII, pray for us, for we still are plagued by the same evil forces today. Our Lady of Peace, Our Lady of the Rosary, Perfect Lady, Heavenly Mother of the Redeemer assumed body and soul into heaven, protect us.

Posted by Chi on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 11:36 AM (EDT):

Stalin was the 20th Century version of Pontius Pilate both of who were obsessed in self-adulation that they could frame or cause to frame any person perceived to stand in their way to remaining the only undisputed potentate of their time. While Pilate acquiesced to the framing of Jesus Christ thus allowing His Crucifixion and Death, Stalin presided over the framing of Pope Pius XII, in order to place the pope in bad light and consequently tarnishing the image of the Catholic Church! What a gory way to play the Anti-Christ!

Posted by Kathleen on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 11:16 AM (EDT):

I was a child during the later pontificate of Pius XII. He was a most benevolent man. My father was in the Benedictine seminary 1939-1941, where he discerned he was not called. But the tradition he passed on to us was that Pius was most holy and totally there for all of God’s humanity.

His pictures made him look very strict, and I remember seeing other photos of him in papal splendor being processed on the chair.

A number of years ago, Pave the Way Organization’s head came on to speak with a radio commentator. He was a Jewish man and spoke about Pius and how his organization was allowed into the Vatican to research Pius, and eventually do an expose on him.

What his organization found out was to the contrary. Not only did they find out the work Pius did for the Jewish people, they ended their research stating that there was no other person in the entire world who helped the Jews during WWII than Pius the XII.

And secondly, they began looking at more documents and did not understand why the Church did not defend itself more to the accusations of the world.

After hearing that, I later saw film clips of Pius going out to pray in Rome during WWII, and to me…he appeared as a saint and so animated and different in personality than what I saw and imagined from his official photos.

God bless Piux XII, and may he pray for us here on earth! I fully support his canonization.

Posted by Michael on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 10:57 AM (EDT):

11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. 12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Posted by Gina Nakagawa on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 9:46 AM (EDT):

It is about time that this horrible, salacious lie about Pope Pius XII be exposed for what it is! God is good. He will not allow His faithful servant to be abused forever. Pope Pius was a good and saintly man who risked so much for those who were persecuted. He has always been “righteous among the Gentiles.” Thanks for a great article.

Posted by liseux on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 9:09 AM (EDT):

I hope this will be in the print edition of the Register. Do you know if it will be? Thanks!

Posted by Mal on Tuesday, Aug 14, 2012 3:52 AM (EDT):

Marxists have always believed that to get the West under their control they had to weaken two of its significant strengths - free enterprise and the Church. Besides the false propaganda that they generated, they successfully planted well-trained and dedicated agents in important institutions and organisations and also in sections of the Church. Their well planned strategy is working very well in the West. Pope Pius X11 was one of their targets and, thankfully, the truth is coming out. Let’s hope we see more revelations of this kind.

Join the Discussion

We encourage a lively and honest discussion of our content. We ask that charity guide your words.
By submitting this form, you are agreeing to our discussion guidelines.
Comments are published at our discretion. We won’t publish comments that lack charity, are off topic, or are more than 400 words.
Thank you for keeping this forum thoughtful and respectful.